1664840 - Collect the number of ads displayed per SERP

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1813160

(Firefox :: Search, task, P2)

Description

[Ben Miroglio [:bmiroglio]]

We currently collect a counter for whether any ads were shown on a SERP page, which is effectively a sum of booleans: https://probes.telemetry.mozilla.org/?search=with_ads&view=detail&probeId=scalar%2Fbrowser.search.with_ads

I'd like to start counting the specific number of ads shown on each SERP (a sum of sums), which will allow us to do more granular analysis around SERP pages in the context of revenue.

Events won't be feasible at 100% of release due to the massive scale, so I propose a keyed scalar by engine that counts the number of ads shown in that subsession to match the granularity of SEARCH_COUNTS and browser.search.*.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

This is likely to be difficult. On Google, some ads have multiple links, some ads just have one - we may be able to scan for class names instead.

On DDG there's some ads which get displayed in a rotating area. We'll need to do some additional processing (or make assumptions) to figure out what is / isn't displayed in that situation (and then if the user rotates, would we count that as well?).

All-in-all, I'm a little concerned that these extra SERP changes (not just this bug, but the other related ones) are going to be complicated to maintain (since they depend on a third-party site), and potentially have an adverse impact on performance.

Is this something that would be done better as an experiment or with some other analysis?

Comment 2

[Ben Miroglio [:bmiroglio]]

That all makes sense. I definitely want to consider all the adverse effects of something like this (like performance). CC'ing mconnor and mdb. Perhaps we'd need to pick one of these SERP additions to balance maintainability/performance, and I'm open to that discussion.

Comment 3

[James Teow [:jteow]]

Attachment: WIP: - Bug 1664840 - Prototype count ads on SERP r?standard8

Having browsed the markup for DDG/Google/Bing, as you suggested Mark it seems possible to get a count based on className but Google hashes their class names.

Another way of tracking Google's search result text ads is with the data-attribute data-text-ad. Might be more reliable over time than using a class, but would require something like querySelectorAll.

Additionally, it would be helpful to fully define a countable ad. A single text ad in the left column search results can have multiple links within itself, which I assume shouldn't count more than a single ad since more likely than not they point to the same source website. Meanwhile, I assume product image ads should be counted discretely since even though they may come from the same retailer, they are associated with a different product.

I added a very rough prototype to Phabricator just to see if navigating to various SERPs could reliably generate counts.

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

This is being done as part of bug 1813160